States and citizens are slowly drifting apart

By Frances Stead Sellers

Financial Times

Published: November 17 2004

When George
W. Bush declared war on terrorism, he pitted a sovereign state
against a concept and sent national armies to fight in the
borderless territory of ideology. The subsequent three years turned
those tables: countries have had to recognise that some of their
citizens belong on both sides of the battleground, while terrorists
have exploited people’s traditional ties to individual countries.
Citizenship laws of the early 20th century were intended to avoid
such dilemmas, which are now symbolised most vividly by the case of
Margaret Hassan, the aid worker now believed to have been murdered
by her kidnappers in Iraq.

Irish by birth, British by upbringing, Iraqi by marriage and a
world citizen by virtue of her commitment to the poor, Hassan was
stranded for weeks between the countries whose passports she
carried. Although she lived in Iraq for 30 years, converted to Islam
and, according to her husband, considered Iraq her “native land”,
she was British as far as her captors were concerned - and, living
as an Iraqi outside Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone, an easy target.
Thus, while her fellow Iraqis protested her kidnappers’ actions,
Hassan made video pleas to her fellow Britons. Her family, in
efforts to help, even offered a third way of classifying her: “She
is Irish, not British,” her husband said. In the end, none of it
mattered.

The threat of war once lent value to a system that guaranteed
individuals the rights and responsibilities of membership of a
single state. As David Martin, a law professor at the University of
Virginia, noted: “However much one could tolerate complex and
layered loyalties in times of peace, war may demand an unquestioning
obedience.” That is why a Hague Convention written in 1930 opens
with: “Every person should have a nationality and should have one
nationality only.” It is why acceptance of more than one citizenship
spread with the optimism that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall.
And it explains why the war on terrorism has renewed concerns about
divided loyalties.

This war has not provided much evidence that duality leads
inevitably to duplicity, as the most fervent critics of multiple
citizenship contend. But it has served to highlight the anomalies
inherent in belonging to more than one culture. They extend well
beyond Mrs Hassan and Teresa Borcz-Kalifa, the Polish-Iraqi woman
who was also abducted in October. Think of Yaser Esam Hamdi: An
alleged Taliban fighter of Saudi descent, he was imprisoned at
Guantanamo Bay; when it emerged he was born in Louisiana and was
thus (unbeknownst to him) a US citizen, he was moved to a Norfolk
naval brig and then sent back to Saudi Arabia. And remember Kenneth
Bigley, the British hostage: Before his beheading, his family rushed
to secure Irish citizenship for him, in the hope that belonging to a
neutral country might save him. The gambit failed but was worth a
try, as Hassan’s family knows.

The old world order, in which citizenship acted as a sort of
global cataloguing system, assigning individuals to countries, has
broken down and it is hard to imagine how to repair it. Today,
diaspora has become destiny. We are mobile, intermarried, mongrel.
More than 100 countries (including the US and UK) accept some form
of multiple citizenship.

The weakening bond between sovereign state and citizen has been
accompanied by the rise of the human rights regime, which diminishes
some concerns about the protections of citizenship because it
supposes that all human beings, regardless of their citizenship,
deserve basic rights. Not all countries abide by those notions, as
Iraqi exiles will tell you. Until recently, Hassan’s British
citizenship must have seemed an asset, a guarantee of rights, rather
than a liability. But by elevating the notion of “personhood” over
“citizenship”, universal rights mean that states can no longer treat
their own citizens as they want and, insofar as they do, others have
the right to complain.

More than 50 years ago, when the United Nations General Assembly
adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it asked that
member countries “cause it to be disseminated, displayed, read and
expounded principally in schools and other educational
institutions”. For now, the declaration remains an aspiration,
enforceable only to the extent that people persuade each other to
abide by it. When Muslim insurgents and US attorneys general can be
persuaded to recognise the universal rights of humanity, the special
rights of citizenship will seem less important.

The writer, an editor at the Washington Post, was a fellow at
the Alicia Patterson Foundation and holds both US and UK citizenship